A Must-Do: Check Your Facebook Privacy Settings

If you haven’t checked your Facebook privacy settings recently, here’s some advice: put aside a solid 30 minutes and do a thorough review of every single item within your profile.

Take a look at the information that you’re sharing, and the kind of information that other people can share about you.

Start by clicking on “Account” on the top right-hand side of your Facebook home page, and then click on “Privacy Settings”:

Go though each of the five sections, particularly the Applications and Websites section:

You’ll see a link called “Instant Personalization”, which controls how Facebook’s partners can personalize their pages for you when you visit their Web sites.

While personalization sounds like a good thing, it also means that Facebook has the ability to feed third-party Web sites information about you even if you don’t want it to happen.

Call me overly-cautious but I’ve been increasingly leery about Facebook and how it has been slowly but surely moving to make more of your information public. The latest changes are major “public” steps forward so now is as good a time as any to check your privacy settings.

For more on what you need to know about Facebook’s privacy setting, check out GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram’s post -
Your Mom’s Guide to Those Facebook Changes, and How to Block Them